


Le Tits Now

by flatdog



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Attempt at Humor, Christmas, Drinking, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-17 13:15:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28600545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flatdog/pseuds/flatdog
Summary: To Sylvain, the thing about Christmas is the booze.Maybe the food as well. And the company too, probably. But there’s nothing quite like that particular time of year where there’s a sparkling tree in the middle of the living room, a mountain of pristine white snow on the driveway and a crowd of people at the mall at all times of day blowing off money on overpriced gifts…
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	Le Tits Now

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shiraishin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shiraishin/gifts).



> wrote this as a holiday gift to the best person in the entire world <3  
> no plot just vibes and shitposting  
> best read in comic sans font color #ff00ff
> 
> read [their gift](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28598925) to me if you like kiribaku! genuinely one of my favorite works now
> 
> [wintery playlist that might or might not go well with the fic](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2u4TitOyR1A9U5PuQh5BS5?si=sg7hixi1SQSbszAKKM4vPw)

To Sylvain, the _thing_ about Christmas is the booze.

Maybe the food as well. And the company too, probably. But there’s nothing quite like that particular time of year where there’s a sparkling tree in the middle of the living room, a mountain of pristine white snow on the driveway and a crowd of people at the mall at all times of day blowing off money on overpriced gifts; all of that makes it socially acceptable for Sylvain to be down two glasses of not-at-all-wintery-and-actually-very-much-summery-now-that-he-thinks-about-it-mulled-wine-is-gross-btw-but-that’s-just-his-opinion cocktails at three in the afternoon.

It’s a wonderful time of the year, especially if Sylvain ignores how their Christmas tree obstructs the path from the doorway to the kitchen just enough to be annoying and inconvenient, but not enough for either him or Dimitri to bother trying to find a better place for it, or, gods forbid, move furniture around. Or that the pile of snow on their driveway shouldn’t actually be there (but it’s _definitely_ not him that has to do the shoveling). Or the stress that comes with him inevitably becoming part of that crowd at the mall later in the month, because he’s the type of guy that says he won’t be careless enough to have to last minute shop, and that is careless enough to have to last minute shop.

He’s not drunk every day of December, because he’s twenty-six and now that his body cells haven’t been regenerating for a year—or some shit, he read about that online ages ago, okay, he doesn’t remember what the article said exactly,—being hungover has not only become an actual threat to his well-being, but he’s wised up enough not to allow himself to let go like that, because he has… _responsibilities_. Not to mention booze costs money, and they have bank loans to pay off, and Dimitri would promptly pass away if he didn’t buy a new video game every other week—that he doesn’t even _finish_ ,— _and_ Sylvain has gotten really into rock painting lately so he’s been blowing moolah on that, plus they’re thinking of redecorating their bedroom… His point is, money. They need that.

And maybe Sylvain should be more thankful in life, like, in general, because when he opens the booze cabinet mid-December—which is an actual thing they have in their house that is the sole reason Sylvain truly feels like an adult—there’s enough there to last them well into the holidays.

So, anyway, he drinks before dinner a few days of the month. Not too much, and not on days he has work, and definitely not more than, say, a few glasses (which are seventy percent juice anyway), but it’s a thing he does. It gets him into the holiday spirit more than the garlands in store fronts and Dimitri’s hideous sweaters that Mercedes knits specifically for him.

You ever tried kicking it back on the couch in the middle of the day and looking out into the snowy front yard as liquor warms your cheeks up and some pleasant background music plays from the TV? You should. Ten out of ten stars, officially Sylvain approved. In fact, if Sylvain made a list of his all-time favorite activities, it would be pretty high up. Maybe just below popping bubble wrap.

It must be an enticing sight; Dimitri joins him sometimes—though he’s more into beer than Sylvain’s orangey-pink concoctions—and then they kick it back together. And maybe sometimes Sylvain places a strategic hand high enough on Dimitri’s thigh, and _maybe_ sometimes they forget they’re meeting their friends in a couple of hours for late dinner at a veggie place downtown they’ve been meaning to check out. That’s on the list too.

But his most favorite thing, hands down, is when the dates crawl into the teens and it is formally allowed to decorate for holidays. He’s not overeager, no, at least not like Annette who puts up a Christmas tree the second she puts down Halloween decorations, but…he won’t lie, not really celebrating any holidays with his family all that much when he was a kid, let alone Christmas, has him really making up for it as an adult. And it’s not just Christmas that suffers, because humans has come up with so many holidays, he doesn’t need an excuse to throw a mini party at their house for any occasion that makes just enough sense to gather together and eat until he has to undo a button on his pants for safety reasons.

Felix says he overcompensates like a white suburban American Christian mom in an unhappy marriage with gay kids who distance themselves from the family, but Felix is the motherfucking Grinch and even a mistletoe over a doorway for him reaches ‘unthinkable levels of cringe’. If you ask Sylvain, it’s Felix who’s cringe. And what’s unthinkable is that somehow Annette, being herself, has been dating Mr. Grinch since high school and they haven’t broken up once. Even he and Dimitri had to take a break from each other somewhere in his second year of college to cool off and reflect. Took them a while to admit they were bringing each other more pain than happiness at the time—it’s not something Sylvain likes to think about.

Of course, since Sylvain _is_ twenty-six, there is none of that magic of waiting for Christmas miracles and for Santa to bring him presents. Decorating is what make him feel all giddy and warm inside, instead. Their house doesn’t change its appearance all that much during the year because neither him nor Dimitri really have any taste for interior design—so it’s easier to let stuff stay as it is,—and even if either of them wants to mix things up, the extent of that is buying new bed sheets or a new figurine to place on their over encumbered shelf of useless stuff they totally don’t need. Hell, they didn’t even invest in a nice couch and used a ratty thrifted one until their second year of living in this house. Dedue kept refusing to come over despite both of them insisting there were no bugs living in it, _they checked,_ while Ingrid once joked about taking a pic of their living room and putting it on Reddit (and got shut down pretty fast by Felix making fun of her of being on Reddit in the first place—at least there’s something the local Grinch is good for.)

Sylvain digresses. About being giddy and warm inside—alcohol does that too. One would find it natural to combine those two activities. Sylvain actively does, because he’s smart like that and enjoys maximizing his fun times by having double the fun. Dimitri does too, so it’s become sort of a tradition to choose a day they’re both off work, pull out a few bottles of beer from the fridge and mix up a few agua frescas and then decorate the house to their hearts’ content.

Sylvain fondly remembers the times back when they were just grown enough not to have to fake their age at the store to buy cider. Dimitri used to be a prude that wouldn’t come near a cigarette, but being around people like Sylvain himself, Felix, Ingrid and even Dedue (who, admittedly, has always had a more sophisticated taste and didn’t drink just to get drunk like the rest of them) would spoil even a guy like him. They never did turn Dimitri into a wild party animal though—Sylvain doubts there’s any time left to do so. Hell, they go to bed at ten in the evening sometimes now, like they’ve been married for twenty years and had raised a child together.

The reality of early adulthood is that no matter how mature you think yourself to be, you’re still dumb as fuck in many aspects, and sometimes you still overdo it, even though you promise yourself you won’t.

Sylvain knows they’ve done did it when he notices the speed with which he enters the kitchen is higher than he expected his feet to pick up, forcing him to stumble into the counters. Dimitri, in turn, has been staring off into the window for the five or ten or fifteen minutes Sylvain was inside the house to refill their snack bowl. The expression on his face can only be described as having reached the _‘woah shit am I drunk right now dude’_ phase that Dimitri inevitably eventually arrives at after picking up his first drink of the night (or day). Frankly, it never fails to make Sylvain laugh. He looks like he’s contemplating the concept of holidays itself, or pondering why he, an atheist Russian, is celebrating the overly commercialized, unmistakably Americanized Christmas that has infected their reality. Knowing how Dimitri gets sometimes, he actually might be.

If being excited about holidays was a spectrum, the both of them would be on the opposite sides of it. Dimitri didn’t even celebrate his own birthday before Sylvain got to know him when they were teenagers.

Sylvain’s laugh startles Dimitri.

“Good?” Sylvain asks him halfheartedly, passing by to dispose the bowl on the side table, with a pat atop Dimitri’s head.

Dimitri hums, dipping his brush into the paint he stole from Sylvain’s rock painting collection. He’s been writing something on the glass of their front porch window, but hasn’t made much progress thanks to all the distractions—namely, the snacks (including Sylvain himself, obviously). Right now, all it says is LETIT in big white letters. Sylvain supposes there’s a space there in-between.

The letters are kind of drippy because Dimitri is using too much paint but Sylvain would give him an A for effort. He’s even writing it mirrored, so the people out on the street can actually read what it says.

“Do you find it too…” Dimitri starts but trails off, starting on the S.

“Cheesy?” Sylvain supplies, unhelpfully parking his ass in one of the chairs in the corner and taking a sip of his cocktail, having now fully given up on untangling an outdoors garland that feels longer than the year they’re getting ready to wrap up here. He’ll get back to it at some point, just not now.

“Yeah,” Dimitri nods and clears his throat, stepping away to consider his handiwork and bumping into the console table behind him. They moved it away from the window so Dimitri didn’t have to knock trinkets off it while leaning over, but with their porch being as small as it is, it’s a tight squeeze.

Sylvain watches with what carefulness Dimitri is painting the letter, enjoying the view of his back and, subsequently, the little dancing deer on his sweater. It’s too on the nose for a date that is over a week away from Christmas Eve, yet somehow cute on Dimitri exactly for that reason. If Sylvain’s weird way of celebrating is hauling down no less than two boxes of decorations from their attic to then make Xmas throw up all over the house, then Dimitri’s is wearing exclusively festive sweaters for a good part of the month.

The writing is definitely cheesy, in a white suburban American Christian mom overcompensating because her husband is distant and doesn’t embrace her in bed anymore and her kids actually call her out on her bullshit when she says something bigoted and it upsets her way. “Nah,” Sylvain remembers to reply.

He props his elbow on the armrest and his cheek on his hand, relaxing and letting the alcohol in his blood make him drift in place a bit.

“It’s cute.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah. You could add some,” he makes a vague gesture with his fingers, “I don’t know, snowflakes on top?”

Dimitri perks up, as if a light bulb just went off in his head, even though technically it went off in Sylvain’s. Maybe they’ve been together for so long, their brains are starting to fuse from such proximity. Now that’s a novel plot he’d love to read, for future reference if anything. “Above the letters? Oh, splendid idea.”

Sylvain spreads his arms, even though Dimitri isn’t looking at him. Damn him. “What can I say, my brilliance knows no bounds. Letting you bask in my genius is only fair.”

His speech slurs a little. There’s a passing thought to drink some water that Sylvain ignores in order to further indulge in his laziness.

Dimitri doesn’t react, instead taking a huge swig from his bottle of ale before continuing with the paint with renewed enthusiasm, hand dwarfing the little brush he’s holding. Sylvain cringes at the sight of his boyfriend willingly downing that poison with the thirst of a man stuck in the desert, and takes another timid yet sophisticated sip of his one third vodka, one third gin, one third lychee juice. He might as well limp his wrist while he’s at it.

They finish around seven in the evening—with the living space and the porch, that is, because the outside is a whole another ordeal, and all they ever really do to the bedroom is place a few ornaments here and there, the main bulk of decorations adoring the poor living room, floor to ceiling. There is also a miniature tree on the bathroom counter, with its own miniature ornaments. It even has a star on top.

Dimitri pops some nuggets in the oven because at that point neither of them is capable of actually cooking a proper dinner. He bothers to make some salad too, and Sylvain thanks him for the meal with a kiss that quickly escalates, like it usually does when either of them tastes like the bitterness of alcohol, and puts away taking said meal for another ten minutes.

They’ve stopped drinking more than half an hour ago, but neither of them has sobered up completely, and once the dishes are hidden in the sink, a future they’s problem, they fall onto the couch to admire all the sparkling decorations in the dimmed lights until Sylvain puts on a movie on TV.

It’s a nice mood for a quiet evening in, and the familiar giddiness has Sylvain smiling into the expanse of fabric where he’s resting his cheek on Dimitri’s chest, comfortable to the bone.

They wake up around noon the next day, if only thanks to Dimitri’s alarm. He has to do some work later in the afternoon, but it’s Sylvain’s second day off, therefore around eleven hours to do absolutely nothing but mix more cocktails and finish a show or two if he feels like it. Maybe he’ll play some of that game Dimitri likes about a guy that really loves to fish.

It isn’t until they’ve had breakfast—or lunch, considering the time—that Felix and Anne invite themselves over at six by text, with the single goal of helping Sylvain distract Dimitri from his laptop. Which is a lie, because Sylvain knows they’ll raid their fridge and hog whichever game console is plugged to the TV at the moment of their arrival as well. It’s a familiar ordeal.

Distracting Dimitri isn’t _actually_ on their to-do list _,_ but it’s going to happen regardless, even with Dimitri’s killer mental focus. They could probably just make enough noise from the living room for Dimitri to naturally drift out of the bedroom at some point, be that out of curiosity or loneliness.

It’s six when the doorbell rings, like promised. Sylvain takes approximately half a minute to peel himself off the couch and go open it.

“Christ,” is what Felix greets him with, already looking miffed like he’s been freezing his nuts outside for at least an hour. “Couldn’t have taken you longer to open up?”

“I didn’t even invite you,” Sylvain replies, stepping away to let their friends in despite the put-on hostility. “Hey Annie!”

“Hi!” Annette’s much more pleasant of a guest, throwing herself into a hug against Sylvain’s chest like they haven’t seen each other in weeks. It doesn’t last long, because she immediately gets distracted by the fairy lights Sylvain taped to the hallway wall, like a moth. A very small, orange moth. “That’s so cute. You’ve already decorated!”

“Yeah, we—”

“Speaking of,” Felix pipes up from the living room, shoes already off and carelessly left halfway into the entrance, treating their house like his own home yet again. Sylvain’s back aches just a bit when he bends over to pick them up before the snow melts onto the floor off the soles. “You’re so fucking immature.”

“Ha?” Sylvain chucks Felix’s boots closer to the designated shoe area. He meets Anne’s eye, who makes an unidentifiable face and looks to the floor as he hangs her coat. “What did I do?”

Felix is already spread out on the couch, phone in hand when Sylvain and Annette enter the room. He looks up to give Sylvain the shit eye, and gestures evidently out of the window. It takes Sylvain a second to get what he’s pointing at it—their front porch Dimitri was working on last night, that says LET IT SNOW! in big white letters across the span of the windows. The paint has dried up by now, and there’s snowflakes above each letter like Sylvain suggested, as well as after the exclamation point at the end, and it looks pretty fucking cute despite how cheesy it is—not unlike romantic gestures Dimitri sometimes attempts that Sylvain genuinely appreciates but secretly gets embarrassed about.

He’s got not a clue what is it that is so immature about it.

“And?”

Felix clicks his tongue. “Seriously?”

“What?”

“It’s sort of funny, even though I have to agree it was pretty immature of you!” Annette pipes up from the bathroom where she’s washing her hands.

“Yeah… I still have no idea what you’re talking about.”

It’s then when Dimitri chooses to emerge from their bedroom, squinting at the ceiling lights because he was sitting in front of his brightness-all-the-way-up computer screen in complete darkness again.

“Hey there, guys.”

“Hi Dimitri!” Annette dries her hands with the hand towel and hurries to give Dimitri his deserved hug as well. He does need one at all times of day, that’s a fact.

“I can’t believe you let this idiot do that to your windows,” Felix says, of course, forgoing a greeting yet again because he’s never even heard of having manners.

 _Actually,_ that’s not true, Sylvain knows for a fact his dad tried to teach him, but Felix just refused to be polite out of some shitass rebellious streak he still hasn’t grown out of. Embarrassing, is what it is.

“Pardon?”

“The windows,” Felix elaborates. In quotes. ‘Elaborates’, entirely unhelpfully. Sylvain plops down on the couch next to him and punches him in the shoulder. Not very hard, ‘cos he doesn’t want Felix to start whining as well.

Dimitri lights up like their very own Christmas tree. “Oh, I painted that! Do you like it?”

Annette gasps, while Felix just stares at Dimitri in the silence. Sylvain looks between them and lets out a snort. He really wishes he knew what they meant, though.

“Really? Um,” Annette says, gingerly taking a seat on the couch as well. “It’s pretty funny, Dima.”

“Funny?”

Sylvain and Dimitri exchange a look of bewilderment.

Felix clicks his tongue and picks up their Zony Bustation 4 PB4 Duelstock 4 Custom Weed Patterned Bustation controller Claude got Sylvain as a gift on his birthday last year. It was wrapped in a weed pattered jockstrap, because poor Claude’s sense of humor has been skewed ever since he started going on them internets at the tender age of… fuck, eleven years old? Where were his parents looking? “I thought you were above such things.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

Sylvain sighs.

“Are you guys going to explain it or keep us guessing what in the world you’re getting at?”

“Wait,” now it’s Annette’s turn to look confused, like she has any right to, “it wasn’t intentional?”

 _“What_ was?”

Felix takes a pause from scrolling through their PB4 library. Which means he’s just been switching back and forth between Steampunk 3077 and Finland Fantasies 17. “Maybe go out and take a fucking look.”

Dimitri looks out of the window and Sylvain follows as well, even though he knows he won’t see anything new there.

“At the writing?” Dimitri asks.

Felix looks at him. In italics. _Looks._

“Okay,” Sylvain gets up from the couch, because if he doesn’t get down to the bottom of this, the eight-year-old version of him from the past who really wanted to be a private investigator when he grew up—for some fuckin’ reason—will never forgive him. “I’ll bite.”

It’s when both him and Dimitri step outside, as they are sans outside shoes and already shivering from the biting wind, and stand in front of their porch, that everything becomes clear. Dimitri makes a sound deep in his throat and Sylvain just stares at the front of their house.

Their enclosed front porch has windows across the entire span of the wall, as well as the sides. The nature of it is that when you stand directly in front, you obviously can only see the middle. There are exactly seven separate thin glass panels in the middle, and then two on both sides. LET IT SNOW! consists of ten characters, eleven if you count the snowflake after the exclamation point that is obviously essential to the message. Dimitri simply had no choice but to start from that first panel at the very start, in the side section, if he wanted to fit it all in.

“This is…” Sylvain begins, takes a deep breath and makes a genuine attempt not to laugh. He promises, he really tries. He tries so hard, as if his life is at stake…he probably wouldn’t survive a situation like that, because it takes him approximately three seconds to fail miserably, his guffaw as if stolen straight out of his chest, startlingly loud and ugly. Tears well up in his eyes, and it’s hard to tell whether from the biting wind or the absurdity of it all. “That’s so—”

The _nature_ of it, is when you stand in front of their house, you’re greeted by big white letters smack in the middle of their windows that spell out TITS NOW.

Dimitri sounds choked up when he says, “Well.”

A single look at his reddening face sends Sylvain into another fit, and by the time he drags Dimitri back inside the house by the sleeve, Dimitri is hiding from the world behind the palms of his hands like a shy schoolgirl from all that weird anime Felix loves to watch.

When they enter the house, Annette is desperately pressing a hand against her mouth to not laugh herself sick while Felix himself gives Dimitri a look so nasty it makes Sylvain shudder even though he’s still not done laughing.

“Have you gazed upon it? Are you proud of it?” Felix asks, arms crossed on his chest. He probably finds it just as funny, but he’s had this ability to keep deadpan that Sylvain, whose every emotion shows on his face clear as day, has always been jealous of.

Dimitri sickly wheezes into his hands.

“I might have to burn our house down,” he announces, voice muffled.

Thankfully, Dimitri does not actually burn their place down (Sylvain suspects he’s just not sure where to start, seeing as how Sylvain is the arsonist in their relationship and possesses more knowledge about lighting shit that’s not supposed to be on fire, on fire. Which actually makes no sense, because Dimitri’s dad used to take him camping when he lived back in Russia. Is he suffering from selective amnesia?).

However, later in the night, when the four of them have repeatedly and savagely raided the liquor cabinet, they—meaning Annette, who, drunk, now thinks writing LE TITS NOW is the best thing Dimitri has ever done in his entire life, intentionally or not, and Sylvain, who doesn’t need to be under the influence to share that opinion,— are forced to physically restrain him against the couch lest he tries to grab the paint and try to fix it.

“Let me go…” Dimitri slurs, brush already in hand. They have no idea where he’s got it from or when. The timeline gets a bit muddled when your brain has been taking a smoke break for a few hours with no plans to get back to work in sight.

“No way, man!” Sylvain presses his thighs tighter around Dimitri where he sits on his lap (he really doesn’t know how that happened), while Annette holds his arms against the backrest. “Embrace your failings! It’s not a mistake, it’s a happy accident! Have you not been listening to my boy Bob?”

“You’d ruin it! The greatest Christmas decoration… The best thing I’ve seen in your entire neighborhood! In ours, too. Right, Felix?!” Annette’s voice is entirely too loud and too close to Dimitri’s ear. She rolls a natural twenty, dealing five physical damage against him, who winces and shuts his eyes.

He’s still twitching in their hold—Sylvain is not entire sure how he hasn’t freed himself yet. Sure, he loses control of his limbs as one is wont to do after consuming this much poison, but he can pick up both of them while sober. Surely, his physical abilities don’t degrade this drastically? Is he just acting? Is he losing his grip? Has working from home turned him soft and mush? Yes, he hasn’t had his diamond cut abs for over a year now, a padding of soft around his muscles, but _surely—_ Who’s going to fix stuff around the house—that Sylvain, cursed with an inability to keep things not broken, breaks—from now on? Oh gods, will they have to start calling the repair services? First selective amnesia, now this? Has his Dimitri been replaced with a clone?

Sylvain loses his balance after another attempt at escaping from Dimitri’s part and falls face first into his shoulder. “Are you losing it? Are you an evil double?” he mumbles against the sweater.

Dimitri pauses in confusion. “Huh?”

“Felix!”

Felix is lying back, leaning on his elbow, eyes closed like he’s in deep pain. He’s drunk as shit, maybe drunker than them all. Sylvain has lost count of his own drinks ages ago.

“Snake…” Felix starts.

Sylvain groans.

“Felix!” Annette cranks up the volume on her voice box.

“Why are we still here?” He takes a pause. “Just to suffer? Every night, I can feel my leg and my arm…”

All of a sudden, Sylvain feels really, really tired.

“You’re so full of shit, you know that?” he mumbles again, not making any effort to pick himself back up. His head is spinning, and Dimitri is incredibly comfortable now that he has stopped struggling. He’s half-man half-furnace, and gods know the heating in their house is abysmal.

“…even my fingers,” Felix clenches his absolutely normal, healthy, non-amputated arm above the elbow. “The body I’ve lost…the comrades I’ve lost…”

“…won’t stop hurting.” Dimitri continues for him with a somber voice, eyes still shut tight. “It’s like they’re all still here.”

Sylvain squeezes his hand into a fist, letting it drop against the couch. “You feel it too, don’t you?”

Annette presses her face into the closest cushion and screams.

Their house does get on Reddit, just not the part Ingrid wanted to publicly commemorate. Much blood had been lost, fighting for the big white letters so wonderfully decorating the front of their house to stay until the middle of January.

Dimitri keeps telling people their place burned down until then. _No, you can’t come over,_ he says. Sylvain, in turn, thinks it’s only right to expose his elaborate lies as what they are.

Everybody they know keeps thinking it’s his handiwork though, for some reason.

**Author's Note:**

> [shitpost sauce](https://i.imgur.com/CFmi54X.png) though that's not exactly how i imagined their house to look like  
> [my very bad twitter](https://twitter.com/faggoteen)


End file.
